Video communication, such as video conferencing involving two or more parties, is becoming increasingly popular as the visual quality improves and the cost decreases. With video communication a first party is able to interact visually with a second party across a communication channel that has a finite bandwidth. An image of the first party is usually acquired with a camera as a series of frames. In order to transmit the frames from the first party to the second party across the communication channel, the video frames are encoded to reduce their bandwidth.
When a codec is applied to video frames, a video bitstream is produced that has a reduced bandwidth. Significant research has been devoted to developing codecs that result in video bitstreams with low bandwidth usage and high quality images (e.g., good rate-distortion performance). Such codecs have therefore become increasingly elaborate and complex. Consequently, these codecs make ever-increasing demands on the resources of video encoding devices.
Some devices, such as fixed and dedicated video conferencing equipment, have sufficient resources to employ these complex codecs. However, other devices do not have sufficient resources to satisfactorily employ modern codecs. For example, many mobile devices suffer from weak computational power, short battery lifetime, and limited display capability.
Accordingly, there is a need for schemes and/or techniques that simplify video coding so that a resource-friendly video codec may be employed in resource-limited devices while good video quality is maintained.